Top 70 Isadora Duncan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”

— Isadora Duncan

2. “The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am.”

— Isadora Duncan

3. “To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.”

— Isadora Duncan

4. “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”

— Isadora Duncan

5. “Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.”

— Isadora Duncan

6. “So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.”

— Isadora Duncan

7. “It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”

— Isadora Duncan

8. “If I could explain, I wouldn’t need to dance!”

— Isadora Duncan

9. “I do not teach children, I give them joy.”

— Isadora Duncan

10. “Movements are as eloquent as words.”

— Isadora Duncan

11. “Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.”

— Isadora Duncan

12. “The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.”

— Isadora Duncan

13. “The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies. It begins with lies and half our lives we live with lies.”

— Isadora Duncan

14. “Farewell my friends, I go to glory.”

— Isadora Duncan

15. “I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.”

— Isadora Duncan

16. “Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.”

— Isadora Duncan

17. “The Dance – it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.”

— Isadora Duncan

18. “My motto – sans limites.”

— Isadora Duncan

19. “People don’t live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.”

— Isadora Duncan

20. “What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life.”

— Isadora Duncan

21. “What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.”

— Isadora Duncan

22. “I am seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement.”

— Isadora Duncan

23. “A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever. They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.”

— Isadora Duncan

24. “Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love – to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.”

— Isadora Duncan

25. “The artist is the only lover; he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.”

— Isadora Duncan

26. “Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.”

— Isadora Duncan

27. “Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.”

— Isadora Duncan

28. “The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise.”

— Isadora Duncan

29. “The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.”

— Isadora Duncan

30. “With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.”

— Isadora Duncan

31. “I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example – out of the prison of corsets.”

— Isadora Duncan

32. “I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.”

— Isadora Duncan

33. “All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture...”

— Isadora Duncan

34. “Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.”

— Isadora Duncan

35. “It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.”

— Isadora Duncan

36. “My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.”

— Isadora Duncan

37. “The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.”

— Isadora Duncan

38. “Don’t let them tame you.”

— Isadora Duncan

39. “Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.”

— Isadora Duncan

40. “No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.”

— Isadora Duncan

41. “To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.”

— Isadora Duncan

42. “Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.”

— Isadora Duncan

43. “The dancer will not belong to any nation but to all humanity.”

— Isadora Duncan

44. “I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years.”

— Isadora Duncan

45. “I finally discovered the source of all movement, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born.”

— Isadora Duncan

46. “It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.”

— Isadora Duncan

47. “Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply ‘In my mother’s womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.’”

— Isadora Duncan

48. “We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.”

— Isadora Duncan

49. “I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.”

— Isadora Duncan

50. “To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.”

— Isadora Duncan